Most businesses incorrectly assume paper payslips are a thing of the past. (Image: AI-enhanced)
As National Arbour Week (1-7 September) turns attention to conservation, a Genghis Technology analysis of South Africa's payroll sector puts a number on a habit most businesses assume has already gone digital: paper payslips.
Based on Stats SA formal employment data, roughly 11 million to 12 million people are paid monthly across the formal, agricultural and domestic sectors. Industry estimates that around a third to just under half of the workforce still receives payslips by paper rather than e-mail or app; the analysis puts the figure at an estimated 5 million to 5.4 million paper payslips printed every month. At standard paper-yield conversions, that's in the range of 600 to 650 trees' worth of paper a month, or roughly 7 000 to 7 800 trees a year.
The gap is driven less by employer inertia than by structural inequality in digital access. Industry estimates suggest around three-quarters of South Africa's workforce is "deskless", without regular access to e-mail or self-service HR portals, concentrated in sectors like security, construction, cleaning, manufacturing and domestic work. Even employers that have tried to digitise report that access and adoption remain uneven across a distributed, often lower-income, workforce.
The paper trail also carries legal exposure. A compliant South African payslip must include PAYE and UIF deductions, ID numbers, banking details and home addresses. This is all personal information subject to the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA).
Enforcement has sharpened: the Information Regulator issued more than R4 million in fines to small businesses in 2024 alone, with individual penalties able to reach R10 million, and random SME audits are now under way. Unsecured payslips sitting on shared printers or in open filing cabinets fall squarely within POPIA's scope, regardless of whether the underlying payroll system is digital.
The reason paper hasn't disappeared isn't lack of will but rather the access gap. E-mail and self-service portals work for office-based staff, but do little for a distributed or deskless workforce.
That's the specific problem a newer category of mobile-first payroll delivery tools, including South African platform Tempered Talent, has been built to address, routing payslips and leave applications to employees' phones via channels like WhatsApp rather than relying on e-mail or paper.
"Paper payslips aren't a compliance choice, they're a legacy default that most companies never revisited," says Rylin Subrayan, Founder and CEO of Genghis Technology, developer of Tempered Talent. "For a workforce this deskless, digital doesn't mean e-mail but rather meeting people on the channel they already use every day. That's the gap we built Tempered Talent to close.
"The compliance risk gets far less attention than the environmental one, but it's arguably the bigger liability," Subrayan adds. "A paper payslip sitting in an unlocked cabinet or an open pigeonhole is personal financial data exposed under POPIA, full stop. Companies think of this as an admin problem, but it's actually a legal one."
For businesses uncertain where paper-based processes are quietly costing them, Genghis Technology is offering a digitisation analysis to South African companies wanting a clearer picture of where automation and digital payroll delivery could reduce cost, admin time and compliance risk. The assessment looks at current payslip and document workflows and identifies where the business case for going digital is strongest. Companies interested in a digitisation analysis can contact Genghis Technology via the details below.
Methodology note: the payslip and tree-count figures in this release are modelled estimates, not published government or industry statistics. No single body currently tracks paper-versus-digital payslip volumes nationally. They are derived by applying an estimated non-digital delivery share to Stats SA formal employment figures, then converting sheet volume to trees using standard paper-yield conversions (approximately 8 300 sheets per tree). Figures should be cited as estimates.
